Ideology, science, and people in Amílcar Cabral

14 Pages·2017·0.17 MB·English

Ideology, science, and people in Amílcar Cabral
Ideology, science, and
people in Amílcar Cabral
NEVES, José. Ideology, science, and
people in Amílcar Cabral. História,
Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos, Rio
de Janeiro, v.24, n.2, abr.-jun. 2017.
Available at: http://www.scielo.br/hcsm.
Abstract
The present article contributes to the
debate on how historians and social
scientists perceive and understand
relations between ideology and science,
which are often seen as realms belonging
to rival kingdoms. Following an
analysis and critical positioning vis-à-vis
Cabralian studies, the text examines how
scholars of Cabral have portrayed his
agronomic activities. It then undertakes
a genealogical analysis of the Cabralian
concept of people and suggests that the
emergence of this concept in Cabral’s
discourse derives from the intersection
of the development of anti-colonial
nationalist thought in the former
Portuguese Empire and the development
of agrarian studies in metropolitan
Portugal.
Keywords: Amílcar Cabral (1924-1973);
agrarian studies; anti-colonialism;
science; people.
José Neves
Professor, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas/Universidade Nova
de Lisboa; researcher, Instituto de História Contemporânea/Universidade
Nova de Lisboa.
Avenida de Berna, 26
1069-061 – Lisboa – Portugal
[email protected]
Received for publication in May 2015.
Approved for publication in October 2015.
Translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0104-59702017005000001
v.24, n.2, abr.-jun. 2017 1
José Neves
This discussion of writings by and about Amílcar Cabral (1924-1973) begins with a brief
account of his biographical background. Going on to examine certain interpretive
tendencies visible in Cabralian studies, I open a window from which we can observe and
discuss something of the past of one of the most renowned figures in contemporary African
history. With the intention of contributing to the debate surrounding an issue of more
general historical and historiographic interest, that is, relations between science and ideology,
I then take a critical and complementary look at how these studies have understood Cabral’s
scientific training. As I trace the roots variously attributed to the Cabralian concept of people,
I explore both the emergence of anti-colonial nationalist thought in the former Portuguese
Empire and the development of agrarian studies in metropolitan Portugal.
Amílcar Cabral and Cabralian studies
Amílcar Cabral had just turned 20 when he arrived in Lisbon in 1945. Born in 1924 in
the territory of what is now Guinea-Bissau, he and his family had moved to the archipelago
of Cape Verde, along the western coast of Africa, when he was still young. He did so well in
his studies there that the Portuguese government awarded him a college scholarship, and
so he headed to the capital of what was then the empire, where he attended the University
of Lisbon’s School of Agriculture (Instituto Superior de Agronomia, ISA). In his early years
in Portugal, Cabral spent a good deal of time at the Casa de Estudantes do Império, built in
1944 to receive students from colonial territories. He engaged in opposition movements that
sought to bring down the Salazar dictatorship and kept up with the events that heralded the
arrival of a postcolonial world, including the independence of India in 1947 and the Chinese
Revolution in 1949. It was only in the 1950s that political activities began playing a greater
role in his life. Following his graduation from the university, he started doing agrarian research,
for example, conducting soil studies in Angola, where he worked with Botelho da Costa and
Ário Lobo de Azevedo, and collaborating with the Research Brigade on Plant Protection of
Overseas Products (Brigada de Estudos de Defesa Fitossanitária dos Produtos Ultramarinos).
In tandem, Cabral began attending a series of political meetings, which culminated in the
1956 foundation of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (Partido
Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde, PAIGC), an organization that he was
to head over the course of the long war against Portuguese colonialism (1963-1974).
Cabral was assassinated in January 1973 under circumstances that have never been fully
clarified, and he witnessed neither Guinea-Bissau’s declaration of independence nor the fall
of the longest-standing European colonial empire, marked by the Portuguese Revolution on
April 25, 1974. Yet his name is indelibly linked to this historical outcome, and countless
scholars worldwide have done biographical studies on him, some before his death. We can
safely say that Cabral has been the object of incomparable attention among twentieth-
century Portuguese political figures and even among other anti-colonial leaders who fought
the Portuguese Empire.
Some of the scholarship on Cabral has shown particular appreciation for the historical
weight of his political activities. This is notably the case with his foremost academic biography,
Amílcar Cabral: revolutionary leadership and people’s war, by Patrick Chabal (1983). A leading
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Ideology, science, and people in Amílcar Cabral
figure in so-called Lusophone studies since the publication of this work, Chabal placed
special emphasis on the strategic reversal adopted by the PAIGC in the late 1950s. After
August 3, 1959, when some fifty people were killed by the colonial forces in their efforts to
halt a dockworkers strike in Bissau, the most active PAIGC units decided to retreat from the
city. In the aftermath of what has become known as the Pidjiguiti massacre, militants like
Cabral headed into the interior, where they tried to recruit forces and develop a new strategy
for fighting colonialism. Cabral’s activities in this war of liberation are often recognized as a
decisive factor in both military and diplomatic terms, and Chabal was particularly emphatic
in this regard.1 Arguing in favor of biography over approaches that he labeled structuralist or
Marxist – which he saw as devaluing human will as a determinant historical factor – Chabal
assigned major importance to the figure of Cabral and especially to his role as a political
and military leader.
Chabal proffered his biographical representation of Cabral as a man of action in contrast
with other authors who, in their studies of the top PAIGC leader, stressed the singularity of
his thought. The latter tendency has grown stronger in recent years within the framework
of the theoretical approach to the question of culture in postcolonial studies, where Cabral is
mandatory reading. For example, the recent Routledge companion to postcolonial studies states:
A theorist rather than a creative writer, Cabral has become an important figure in
postcolonial studies for his analysis of the process of decolonization in English-language
collections such as Return to the Source (1973) and Unity and Struggle (1980). He has thus
become a Lusophone counterpart to Frantz Fanon, who wrote primarily about Algeria’s
traumatic war of independence against France (1954-62), and to Anglophone writers/
independence leaders, such as Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya) and Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana)
(Murphy, 2007, p.67).2
A certain canonization of Cabral’s thought or theoretical production can likewise be traced
to sources other than postcolonial studies. Some studies portray him essentially as one of
the great theoreticians of military strategy, alongside Clausewitz or Nguyen Giap (Chaliand,
1982). Others reserve a special place for the Cabralian idea of culture within the history of
Marxism, comparing him to Antonio Gramsci or Paulo Freire (Marrocu, 1998; Pereira, Vittoria,
2012). Be that as it may, any of these past and present framings of Cabral’s thought and ideas
(and other examples could be listed) are susceptible to the critique lodged by Chabal in the
early 1980s. Even though Chabal’s own study devoted one chapter to what he called Cabral’s
political and social thought, the biographer voiced misgivings about analyses like those of
Ronald Chilcote (1968), a U.S. researcher who in 1968 published an article meaningfully
entitled “The political thought of Amílcar Cabral” in The Journal of Modern African Studies.
In Chabal’s mind, studies like Chilcote’s erred because they tended to force a heterogeneous
body of texts to fit into a principle of unified whole, even though Cabral had written his
texts under diverse circumstances and for diverse ends (Chabal, 1983, p.167).
Arising from the biographical background of Cabral’s biographers, the discord between
Cabralian scholars provides good guidance when researching him.3 In my own interpretation,
I hope to avoid two pitfalls. The first is the temptation to insinuate that Cabral’s texts form an
oeuvre. This is in part what happens in approaches that underscore his theoretical inclinations
and mold him in the image of an author who is possibly on the verge of canonization,
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José Neves
where he would be abstracted out from the vicissitudes of his experience as a militant. The
second is not giving due weight to the importance of intellectual activity in Cabral’s life.
This consideration is not always present in some studies on him, starting with Chabal’s
biography, where the overriding view is that language is a secondary political reality, as evinced
when the biographer states: “Cabral was primarily a man of action. His political leadership is
best understood by looking at what he did rather than at what he said” (Chabal, 1983, p.167).
It is with these considerations in mind that, later in these pages, I offer a contribution to a
genealogy of the concept of people in Cabral’s discourse. When I chose to focus my analysis
on a concept, in line with the conceptual history developed by Reinhart Koselleck and the
Bielefeld School, my purpose was to re-ascribe to words the importance that others have
denied them; it is clear to me that if the concept “people” describes, identifies, and objectifies
a given reality, it concomitantly creates, activates, and subjectifies this same reality (Koselleck,
2011). Concurrently, in undertaking this analysis from a genealogical approach, to borrow
terms close to Michel Foucault (1979), I practice a history of ideas where ideas emerge less
as a product of original thought than as a constitutive element in a series of relations with
other subjects and objects. In the present article, while endeavoring to uncover the manifold
historical relations lying at the root of the Cabralian concept of people, I focus mainly on
the relations established between this concept and other discursive practices. My aim is to
discover what an author means to say when he utters a given word, but, consonant with
the shift fostered by Pocock, Skinner, and the Cambridge School, I also construe this act of
utterance as part of a linguistic context that enfolds the author’s very intentions (Pagden,
1987). I am thus especially attuned to the intertextuality of the concept of people, that is,
to the fact that the Cabralian concept finds broad resonance in the semantic universes of
contemporary political ideologies but also displays meanings circumscribed to the realm
of scientific knowledge.
My approach here may owe much to my contact with certain theoretical proposals,
particularly those that grew out of Foucaultian expressions like “technology transfer”
(Foucault, 2000, p.333), but also to my contact with empirical material on the case under
analysis, such as the following statement by Luíz Cabral, PAIGC militant and leader: “he
[Amílcar Cabral] spoke about the struggle in the same way that he would speak about
agriculture” (Chabal, 1983, p.53).
Science and ideology in Cabralian studies
According to historians who have analyzed the colonial war in Guinea, one of the
prime factors behind the PAIGC’s political and military success was its skill in adapting to
its environment. As Cabral’s biographers would have it, among other raisons d’être, this
adaptability reflected the discernment of the biographee himself, a discernment that was
refined over the course of his career. After he finished his bachelor’s degree in 1952, with a
thesis focused on the township of Cuba, in the Alentejo region of southern Portugal, Cabral
spent the following years working in agronomy and returned to Guinea as assistant director
of the Agricultural and Forestry Services (Serviços Agrícolas e Florestais). In 1953, he headed
a small team that conducted a census of rural Guinea at the request of the Portuguese
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government, which was thus following through on a pledge to the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations (FAO) (Cabral, 1956), in turn part and parcel of the
international pressure brought to bear on Portuguese colonialism following World War II.
Cabral’s biographers point to this survey as one of his most important experiences. Chabal
(1983, p.48) writes: “The opportunity to travel all over Guinea and to talk to the villagers
was a crucial experience for Cabral, who, having been educated in Cape Verde and Portugal,
had until then little real knowledge of Africa.” For around five months in 1953, Cabral
and his small team traveled Guinea, gathering information and data to form a statistical series
on the country’s rural economy, while simultaneously acquainting themselves with local
social dynamics and daily life. The knowledge of the land and people that Cabral gleaned
through this experience would prove decisive to understanding the country’s economic and
social structure as well as its political and cultural circumstances, and during the war years this
accumulated knowledge would play a hand in the military success of the PAIGC (Rudebeck,
1974; Borges, 2008). In its war strategy, the PAIGC combined military action plans with
the backdrop of economic, social, and cultural networks that sustained the guerrillas and
at the same time replaced the colonizing State in the governance of land and population,
anticipating a form of postcolonial government. The PAIGC thus made surprising use of the
personal contacts and knowledge acquired by its leader in the early 1950s, when he was an
agronomist and not a guerrilla, at the service of the colonial State and not fighting colonialism.
This relation between the practice of scientific inquiry and political and military strategy
invites us to ponder the overall question of whether types of knowledge and political action
can be reconciled. It should be pointed out that the question has not stirred much interest
among Cabral’s biographers, not even those who delved more deeply into the meaning of his
scientific training – the case, as mentioned earlier, of Patrick Chabal and also of Mário Pinto
de Andrade and Pablo Luke Idahosa. In his biography, Chabal contends that it was Cabral’s
scientific training that accounted for his more practical than theoretical understanding
of politics, an understanding that Chabal (1983, p.168) sees as more realist in nature:
“He was basically a realist. His approach was empirical and pragmatic. He had been trained as
a scientist and had worked for 15 years as an agronomist before committing himself fully to
nationalist politics. This experience, and the practical approach to reality which it required,
remained a dominant influence on his personality.” If it is possible to concur with Chabal’s
interpretation up to a certain point, I diverge from him when he portrays science as a factor
that divested Cabral of ideological influences, a type of influence that the biographer views
as pernicious. Chabal’s interpretation draws from an overly rigid separation between science and
ideology, as if the distinction between things and words were replicated within the very
domain of words themselves, based on the assumption that scientific terminology unveils
reality while ideological categories veil it. This type of division effectively constrains Chabal’s
analysis of Cabral’s scientific training. This is the case, for example, when Chabal points to
Cabral’s bachelor’s thesis as a contribution that helped innovate the study of soil erosion, in
that his analyses blended elements of the country’s economic structure and its social structure.
Yet Chabal ascribes the reasons for this blending solely to the scientific realm, as if genealogy
could not consign science to any realm other than science itself. Chabal says (1983, p.39):
“Although in parts of the thesis Cabral uses loose Marxist notions, what emerges most clearly
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José Neves
from the study is the emphasis on a proper scientific approach.” Chabal, who rejects the
notion of any contamination between scientific terminology and ideological categories, argues
that Cabral did not rely on abstract notions, which were plentiful in Marxism-Leninism and
its jargon, but spoke instead of “economic, social, political, and cultural reality” (p.65). In
short, Chabal (p.186) states that Cabral “conceived of theory as a description of reality rather
than merely as a speculative exercise,” but the biographer himself shares this conception of
theory and, accordingly, assumes that Cabral’s discourse is free of any ideological bias – as
if the very act of breaking empirical reality into “economic, social, political, and cultural”
were not in itself historically determined by a given scientific culture.
Furthermore, Marxist-Leninist ideology, in tune with Marx’s division between infrastructure
and superstructure, was in no way a stranger to this same scientific culture. Consider how
Mário Pinto de Andrade (1974) had analyzed the relation between types of scientific knowledge
and political action in Cabral, even before Chabal published his biography. An Angolan
intellectual, sociologist, and militant, Andrade was one of the first to write about Cabral,
whom he knew well. In A guerra do povo na Guiné-Bissau, a small book released in Portugal in
1974 that comprises texts already published elsewhere, Andrade has the following to say about
“Recenseamento agrícola da Guiné:” “in addition to the survey, the study undertook a deeper
analysis of socioeconomic structures, identified the stage of social and cultural development,
and revealed mechanisms of exploitation – in short, it uncovered historical reality.”
He soon adds: “But [Cabral] could not have accomplished this endeavor if his knowledge
and technique had not first been informed by a conceptual apparatus: ‘historical
materialism’” (Andrade, 1974, p.20; emphasis in original). Let us pause to consider Andrade’s
interpretation. On the one hand, like Chabal, Andrade maintains that “Recenseamento
agrícola da Guiné” exemplifies a practice of knowledge that made it possible to access the
analyzed reality. On the other hand, unlike Chabal, Andrade maintains that this knowledge
is possible because of, and not in spite of, Cabral’s adherence to Marxism. In other words,
for Andrade, historical materialism is less the name of an ideology than of a science. Like
many followers of historical materialism, Andrade deemed the method scientifically superior
to others, which he saw as falling prey to the ignominy of idealism and ideology.
We can in fact glimpse similarities between Chabal’s anti-Marxist positivism and Andrade’s
positivist Marxism, as we can recognize a further concurrence: both detect signs of foreignism
within ideology. Chabal says that one of Cabral’s virtues lies in the fact that he did not leave
himself open to foreign models and ideas in his political line but instead drew from its own
history; in Chabal’s (1983, p.142) own words, his ideology “relied essentially on its own history
and not on foreign ideas or models”. Andrade (1974, p.VII), on the other hand, argues that it
was under the influence of the Portuguese Communist Party (Partido Comunista Português,
PCP), and informed by the ideological conceptions of a Eurocentric Marxism, that the PAIGC
made the mistake of investing in urban struggle in the latter half of the 1950s, a strategy it
was only to correct after the Pidjiguiti massacre.
It is only in the writings on Cabral published by Pablo Luke Idahosa, professor at York
University in Canada, that we find a less paradoxical way of looking at science and ideology.
In the opinion of Idahosa (2002), who published a seminal article entitled “Going to the
people: Amílcar Cabral’s materialist theory and practice of culture and ethnicity” in the journal
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Lusotopie, Cabral’s agrarian writings were meant both to conduct a survey of a “culture of
production” and to arrive at a “sociology of identity formation and development.” According
to Idahosa (2002, p.41):
although Cabral’s descriptive-interpretative agronomic surveys came out of a need to
depict the agrarian bases of the colonial commodity economy, it was also rooted in his
own moral developmentalism, where technique is an instrument of popular welfare,
and within which one can see both a culture of production and the foundations of a
sociology of identity formation and development.
In Idahosa’s reading, it is not merely scientific knowledge that allows one to access reality
by imbuing political orientation with realism, as we saw in Chabal’s interpretation. Rather,
it is a certain political and ideological conception, which permeates scientific practice and
carries it beyond any of its proposals. In the eyes of Idahosa, although Cabral’s scientific work
responded to a request by colonial power and was at the service of the colonial economy,
his political ideology meant that his scientific work effectively satisfied concerns of a different
political, or at least moral, tenor (Idahosa, 2002, p.36): “Cabral’s compilation of facts and
statistics obviously was not purely academic scholarship, but reflected his concern for his
first-hand view of what he believed was the existing experiences of the colonised.”
Keeping with Idahosa’s perspective, we could say that scientific activity is determined by
political and ideological purposes and counter-purposes. This circumstance forces scientific
disciplines to become the object of a history that cannot be merely an internalist history of
science, that is, a history in which the origin of more and better scientific knowledge lies
solely in the development of scientific debate itself. The political and ideological factors
in Cabral’s scientific work must also be taken into account, starting with the fact that his
familiarity with Marxism and his humanist leanings spurred him to bring the social and the
economic to bear on a study of the natural environment. However, Idahosa’s analysis also
has important limitations. Specifically, he risks reducing the history of science to the history
of struggles for political and ideological determination, forgoing the need for a history of the
scientific field itself. In other words, in Idahosa’s analysis, ideology determines science, while
the opposite apparently is not as admissible. If, in the judgment of Chabal (or of Andrade),
science serves as a means of revealing reality in crystal-clear fashion and of shedding light on
political action in the sense of realism, liberating it from ideological obfuscation, then science,
from Idahosa’s perspective, tends to be guided by political and ideological orientations – as
if the vicissitudes of the scientific field were a secondary chapter in the general history of
these orientations.
I diverge from Chabal’s and Andrade’s interpretations as well as from Idahosa’s. While
I do appreciate the many empirical and analytical elements presented in their work, I
would situate Cabral’s scientific work within a dual frame: that of the history of science and
that of the history of political ideologies. To this end, I raise such questions as: Does “pure
academic study” also concern itself with “the real experiences of the colonized?” And I
would answer this question in the affirmative. If colonial science sought to objectify natural
resources and soil qualities, it nevertheless did not ignore what it saw as social and human
in nature, as in recent work on science under the Portuguese Empire following World War II
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José Neves
(Castelo, 2012, 2014; Ágoas, 2012). Further, thanks to likewise recent work on the history of
sociology in Portugal, by Frederico Ágoas, we also now know that agrarian studies formed one
of the roots of the discipline of sociology in Portugal. Over the course of the century,
including the period of the dictatorship, part of those studies shifted away from the practical
administration of agricultural matters, first to analyses within what was already the realm of
political economy and, second, to the development of disciplines like agrarian geography
and rural sociology (Ágoas, 2010, p.199). It can be said that this tendency to “sociologize” a
portion of agrarian knowledge found some expression in Cabral’s scientific journey. This is
apparent in his bachelor thesis, a study that bore witness to a shift in the field of pedology,
when the latter discipline took on ecological concerns, in the sense of concern not only for
land, flora, and fauna but also for men and their social relations. It can thus be said that
Cabral and his agrarian studies played a certain role in the broader process of the sociologizing
of agronomy. In other words, in my view it is not exactly a matter of disagreeing but
rather of agreeing with Idahosa (2002, p.43) when he says: “While there is never a one-to-
one correspondence between production and culture for Cabral, he did want to assert that
there is an important affinity between the way in which people produce and their outlook
on life and the world.” But I would cast this affinity as a product of both Cabral’s political
and ideological motivations and his professional and scientific path, as we will now see in
regard to the genealogy of the Cabralian concept of people.
“People” in Amílcar Cabral
The following thesis gains shape in Cabral’s agrarian texts, written mostly in the 1950s: to
the extent that the economic progress of Guinea depends upon the progress of agriculture,
it depends not only on the “adaptability of a number of industrializable, high-yield crops
to the agricultural and climate environment” but also on the creation of “conditions that
in both human and physical terms allow the resources offered by the environment to be
valorized and used integrally for the good of the progress of Guinea” (Cabral, 1959, p.349).
Accordingly, writing in an article released in the journal Agros, published by the University of
Lisbon’s School of Agriculture, Cabral (1959, p.350) also held that “the access of Guineans to
technical agricultural learning in particular and to instruction in general” should be fostered,
alongside “an agrarian structure, based on local traditions, commensurate with the progressive
development of its populations.” In other words, looked at from Cabral’s agronomic viewpoint,
questions that might be deemed strictly natural in tone had to be considered, but so too did
the human and social facets of this nature, consequently requiring the technical training of
individuals and the molding of the agrarian structure to local specificities.4
The desire for reform that inhabits Cabral’s agrarian texts may be regarded from two
different angles. On the one hand, it can be taken in the context of the ethical role that he
assigns to agronomists, which is clear when he states that these professionals “should work
doggedly, against all obstacles, to raise the level of the life of rural populations” (Cabral,
1959, p.350). This notion about the role of the agronomist reveals a humanist conception
of science and also of culture in general and technique in particular. On the other hand, the
ambition for reform expressed in Cabral’s writings – which is the result of a humanist idea
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that derives in part from a political and moral order (which we may deem either inherent to
science, as in Andrade’s analysis, or imposed on science, as in Idahosa’s) – likewise evinces
a more general process: a mounting incorporation into economics of social and human
elements and of the scientific knowledge devoted specifically to the latter. In this light, we
can say that when Cabral (1951, p.15) appealed to the human responsibilities of science and
scientists, he was critiquing the intellectual who retreats from the world to cloister himself
in an ivory castle (to borrow the terms of the controversial anti-Fascist intellectuals of the
1930s), as he was also signaling the growing entwinement of the realms of political ideology,
scientific knowledge, and economic production, an entwinement that is further suggested
by the flexibility and multifunctionality of certain concepts.5
It is precisely in one of Cabral’s agrarian texts that he makes his first attempt to define
the concept of people. In “Acerca da contribuição dos ‘povos’ guineenses para a produção
agrícola da Guiné” (On the contribution of the Guinean ‘peoples’ to the agricultural
production of Guinea), published in 1954 in the Boletim Cultural da Guiné Portuguesa,
Cabral offers some thoughts on the rural survey that he led in 1953. He criticizes the fact
that agronomic analyses in the field of pedology (the topic of his bachelor thesis) were too
caught up in the primacy of territory-population and, for the first and quite likely only time,
he tries to arrive at a definition of the concept of people. Cabral (1954, p.776) says it is not
enough “to consider the factor ‘population’ when deducing differences in the contribution
to the entire cultivated area,” but that it is just as necessary to incorporate another factor,
which he will call “people.” Cabral (p.776) writes: “A ‘people’ with a given population can
cultivate a larger (or smaller) area than that which is cultivated by another with a larger
(or smaller) population. This suggests that it is important to study the features of family
agriculture (agricultural technique, cultivated area, productivity) in order to ascertain the
economic value of each ‘people’.”
The emergence of the word “people” in Cabral’s agrarian writings is of no surprise to anyone
who reads his discourse in the light of its most immediate political and ideological context.
Most especially in the 1940s, “people” is a word that came to the fore in the semantic universes
circumscribing Cabral’s political life. The word is notable in the framework of the various
anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles that marked the period immediately following
World War II, as in the expression “people’s war,” associated with Chinese Maoism. It also
became one of the most oft-heard designations for the political subject in anti-fascist discourse
in Europe, as apparent in the brief statistical record on the case of Portuguese Communism
that I compiled, where the word “people,” alongside others like “democracy,” figures larger
in the years immediately following 1945.6 This can be understood as an evolution of consent,
and even a deliberate one at that, if we take note of the changes that transpired from the first
to the second half of the twentieth century in the heart of Marxist theorization concerning
national questions. In 1908, the Marxist Rosa Luxemburg (1988, p.39) wrote:
When we speak of the ‘right of nations to self-determination,’ we are using the
concept of the ‘nation’ as a homogeneous social and political entity. But actually,
such a concept of the ‘nation’ is one of those categories of bourgeois ideology which
Marxist theory submitted to a radical re-vision, showing how that misty veil, like the
concepts of the ‘freedom of citizens,’ ‘equality before the law’ etc., conceals in every
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José Neves
case a definite historical content. In a class society, ‘the nation’ as a homogeneous
socio-political entity does not exist. Rather, there exist within each nation classes
with antagonistic interests and ‘rights’ (emphasis in original).7
In the latter half of the twentieth century, on the other hand, we find the following
definition in Álvaro Cunhal (1974, p.214), chief leader of the PCP:
In the era of imperialism, Lenin took Marx and Engels’ expression [‘Workers of
the world, unite!’] and recast it as ‘Workers and Oppressed Peoples and Nations of the
World, Unite!’ Today, as the anti-imperialist struggle spreads across the world, deposing
the colonial system, Lenin’s words are especially opportune. Through the national
liberation movement, the unity of the international working class and of its greatest
creation and fortress – the socialist camp – will lend undefeatable momentum to the
forces of revolution (emphasis in original).
In this context, it is reasonable to presume that when Cabral utters the word “people”
(and the same could be said about other anti-colonial militants), he is embracing the strategy
of national political mobilization that found footing in nineteenth-century liberalism and
twentieth-century European Marxism, both of which endeavored to identify a subject that
was at once unifying – that is, capable of merging a nation’s internal ethnic and social
differences – and fracturing – that is, capable of sustaining a nation against an external
enemy (Neves, 2008, 2009).
Similarly, Cabral’s use of the word “people” reflects the echo of literary movements and
projects like the Cape Verde magazine Claridade, first released in 1936 (Alberto Carvalho, 1998).
But, as we have seen, it was precisely within the framework of his agrarian studies that Cabral
worked to arrive at a conceptual definition of people. Science reveals itself here as a valuable
arena for determining the names of the collective subject and for debating the significance
of these names. In the specific case of agronomy, words like “population” and “people” were
sometimes brought into play as a way of objectifying and subjectifying social relations and/
or relations within a national community. In this particular area, Cabral’s positions cannot
be disassociated from coeval developments within pedology in the colonial context – and
especially the international role of studies by his teacher Botelho da Costa (Sousa, 1971) – just
as they should also be viewed as fruit of a longer-running historical process. Take the case,
also studied by Ágoas (2010, p.298), of the scholarship conducted at the University of Lisbon’s
School of Agriculture in the 1920s, in which the demographic connotation of population
is complemented by a “demological” connotation that ties in with an economic and social
dimension, which is strictly naturalist. In the article “População: importância do seu estudo
dentro da economia” (Population: the importance of its study within economics), printed
in 1927 in the institute’s student magazine, Agros, the student author wrote: “Agriculture is
effectively one of those branches in which man, in order to exercise his activities, ‘needs to
better and more deeply know the environment in which he lives and the population that
lives therein’” (Benoliel, 1927, p.130; emphasis in original). While still working with the
concept “population,” here we note the cry for a science aimed at the human and social
factors in production, that is, for knowledge that advances simultaneously toward quantifying
products and investigating the subjectivity of producers. Citing the 1927 article again: “What
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